A system based approach to construct a Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) specific pathway crosstalk network

Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) is one of the human cancer viruses associated with Kaposi's sarcoma, a dominant AIDS-related tumor of endothelial cells, and several B-cell malignancies. Although much advancements have been made in understanding the mechanism of KSHV, signaling pathways activated during early infection and their functions in virus entry are still unclear. From a system of systems point of view, a pathway can be viewed as a biosystem consisting of group of interacting molecules such as genes and proteins to carry out a specific biological function. We developed a method to determine clusters of functionally related pathway at different time conditions as well as identifying the significant subnetworks. This article is the first known to present a system based analysis to infer a biologically relevant functional network specific to KSHV. Such network may reveal discriminative subnetwork markers for the treatment of Kaposi's sarcoma.